International Travel Times Two - 2007

I am in my hotel room in Bangkok waiting for my friend and supplier to pick me up for the day’s activity. We will be visiting a number of different orchid and foliage nurseries during my four days in Thailand. This is the middle stop after eleven days in China and Hong Kong and before three days in Holland. Add in the four travel days and I’m away from home for 22 days during a very busy shipping season. This is about the average amount of time it takes to go around the world and be effective. How does it make sense to spend so much time traveling when there’s so much productive work to be done at home?
For a change, I’m not making the trip alone. There’s a bright young woman right out of university who has joined the company and in her first seven months this will be her second trip around the world. It’s quite nice to have her along as I easily get confused about which direction to go in the enormous trade fair halls. More importantly, she does the hard work of follow up: ordering products, tracking containers and communicating with loads of suppliers. I am quite good at getting on and off airplanes but not so good at doing all of the detail work that makes the travel more effective. Thankfully, it won’t be long before I do not have to go on these trips at all, as she can do it herself.
What always seems to happen is that I learn more about things that I did not intend to learn about than things that I set out to learn. On the first part of this trip, I was in the bar of the Kowloon Hotel for happy hour and struck up a conversation with someone from Great Britain who manages celebrity garden products. Over the next several days in Hong Kong and China, we were able to meet and trade valuable information on suppliers from different countries. Each of us has spent years doing something similar but with different results. Sharing our knowledge helped both of us a great deal. And all it took was one of us reaching out to say hello to a stranger and engaging in conversation.
Upon my arrival in Bangkok, I was pleasantly surprised to find that accompanying my long-time supplier (who was picking us up from the airport) was a new grower friend of mine from Australia. As it turns out, Barry came to Bangkok at the same time I did. The last time I saw Barry was in Taiwan for the Taiwan Orchid Show last month. I may see him in Australia next month. We spent the day visiting nurseries and comparing information from our experiences. I am quite interested in understanding how the cash-and-carry wholesale system works in Australia and he is interested in learning anything about orchids.
In two days we are off to Holland. I cannot predict what will come of it. We have a full schedule and I hope it’s as productive as the rest of the trip.
When we plan this sort of trip we’re targeting new information about certain products and suppliers and trying to find new and interesting items to offer our customers. The most valuable thing we end up finding though, is interesting people with whom we can share knowledge and mutually multiply our efforts. It’s impossible for one person to do what several people can. People from different parts of the world offer a completely different perception of the shared experience.
Not all of the people I meet are about the business. Last night, coming back late, I ran into Jim in the hotel lobby. The last time I saw Jim was three years ago in the same hotel. This was our third meeting. Jim is a fine man who has lived full his last 70 years. Having migrated from Scotland to Australia as a young man, he has seen quite a bit of the world. I was tired and wanted to go to bed when we ran into one another, but Jim was going to be leaving the next day—I could not miss another conversation, maybe my last, with Jim.